


Everything Reminds Me Of Her

by infiniteoceansofblue



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29717103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteoceansofblue/pseuds/infiniteoceansofblue
Summary: Izzie dies. This is Alex, in the aftermath.
Relationships: Alex Karev/Izzie Stevens
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Everything Reminds Me Of Her

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: grief, talk and depiction of death, small reference to vomit, casual references to self-harm/suicide (no actual self-harm or suicide occurs), depiction of mental health issues, dissociative episodes, reference to past child abuse, depiction of cancer, funeral scene
> 
> Title from Everything Reminds Me Of Her, by Elliott Smith. 
> 
> I wrote this months ago, after a quarantine-inspired Grey's Anatomy rewatch... No, I will never get over Alex Karev and Izzie Stevens. Let me know if other warnings are necessary, but I think I covered the major ones.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what choice Alex could have made. What matters is his face pressed against the bathroom floor in a parody of an act he was a faraway observer of, once. Only now, he is the lone participant; he is the only one alive, after all. 

When her fiancé died he’d watched from the side-lines in silent, suppressed the instinctual I-told-you-so-ism, a feeling so bitter he never voiced it. It came only because he loved her too much to watch it happen. He was different, then. His arrogance, a shield and a weapon. He thought he could have spared her the pain, even as he knew nothing could have stopped her, and nothing did stop her. She would have accepted Denny’s proposal, married him, had his babies, cut his LVAD wire. She would have missed his death by minutes, a hundred times, if she had the chance. 

He wonders what he would’ve done, if he had the choice. The choice to marry her, the choice to talk about babies with her. “Let’s do it soon,” she’d whispered to him over the beeps of her heart monitor, just last week, and neither of them mentioned the fact that she’d been given days, nevermind nine months. He’d pressed his lips to her forehead and held her as tight as he could, whispered, “Okay,” let his mind do the forbidden thing of imagining, of hoping. He held her tight but not tight enough, nothing would ever be enough, this he would know all too soon in a desperate, clawing kind of way. 

If he had the choice. The choice to pull the plug or not, to ignore the DNR, to resuscitate the dead, to pound pointless life into her chest even as he felt her ribs crack like she was already made of the closest thing to glass, which is human body and human matter, dead already. The choice to watch her die, to watch her die, to watch her die, anyway. No, there are never any choices. This is fate; this is heaven or hell, life and death and life again and death, and death, and death -- these are the cards he has been dealt so here he lies on the bathroom floor, here he has laid for days and days, and days he will lie, here he plays the game like a fool, but what would he change?

What would he change, if he had the choice. 

Izzie is dead. This is a fact he cannot change. This is a choice he did not make. But for what she was. For what she does to him. For this terrible awful grief, a violent thing worse than even his father’s fist colliding into his face, the very face he made, what kind of father does that? 

And for her smile. Her soft hair under his hands, turning even the roughest parts of him smooth, her gentle touch saving his life as many times as a sharpened scalpel. For her compassion. For her care, an unflinching force so strong it knocked him to the ground over and over, and he’s fought it before, fought and lost and moped around like a sore loser after, before one day he found himself sharing a bed with her, found her holding all that jabbed and stabbed inside his heart like it was a tender thing instead of the poison it was, and suddenly he didn’t care that he hadn’t won. 

What would he change? 

He closes his eyes. The floor is cold and he is tired, like all his life he has been forced to sleep with his eyes half-open, and he did that, for a long time. But she woke him up completely and fully and now she is gone, she is gone, she is gone. And how can he sleep, alone like this, with only the spectre of her body in a pink prom dress, the image of her cheek pressed against the same bathroom floor those so many years ago, for company? 

He can’t. So he closes his eyes, and he thinks of his wife. 

  
  


For three days, he is on the floor of the bathroom. On the fourth, somewhere around when the sun reaches through the window just right and warmth washes the tips of his outstretched fingers golden, he stands up, shaking and unsteady and about to fall over again.

He doesn’t. Fall over.

So he starts to walk, hand trailing against the wall. It’s pointless; if he passed out, he’d hit his head on the hardwood floor anyway. He imagines he’d be carted off to the hospital. Maybe Meredith would scream if she saw him lying unconscious there, his blood spilling in a fitting halo on her mother’s carpet. If Izzie were here, she’d scream for a doctor, and afterwards they would laugh and laugh and laugh at the irony. 

The stairs are hard. Halfway down he folds to a sit, head in his hands, breathing shakily and fast. Black spots multiply in his vision, even when his eyes are closed. Breathing is hard. Seeing nothing is hard. 

It’s where George finds him. 

“Alex! Are you gonna pass out? Don’t pass out. Drink this.” There’s the sound of rustling, a popping of straw into a box, and suddenly plastic is shoved between his lips. “Suck. It’s a juice box, apple. Don’t mention that I just told you to ‘suck,’ Jesus.” 

He sucks. It is apple. By the time the straw starts making that watery, scraping sound signifying its contact with the bottom of the box, he opens his eyes and sees singulars of everything. 

George is kneeling in front of him, his huge face and Bambi eyes staring at him in stupidly genuine earnest. His hands are hovering around him, nervous, pointless. Alex thinks about pushing George down the stairs. 

“Get outta m’face,” Alex mumbles, batting weakly at him. He makes an aborted attempt to stand, and the sudden change in altitude swirls the sugar in his stomach, and again he imagines himself falling, falling down the stairs, hitting his head, throwing a clot and dying, dying on the floor of Meredith’s mom’s house. It’s a comforting thought, that he could have a quiet time bomb in his head. Just waiting for the right amount of contact to burst and kill him. 

“You shouldn’t be standing.” George touches him, now, hands press carefully around his arms and Alex is led slowly, gently to the ground. He feels weak. He feels like screaming. Thinks, inexplicably, of the baby bird Izzie found on the roof two autumns ago, when she’d gone to the garage to get out the little light-up ghosts she hung on the porch every Halloween. Meredith was good about letting her do anything she wanted to the house, in terms of holiday decor. Especially after Denny. 

The bird was so small in Izzie’s cupped hands, small and shivering and kind of ugly; it was featherless, with these huge orbs of black for eyes, shifting underneath translucent pink skin. She said, “I think her mom is gone. There was no nest, I looked everywhere,” and Alex stayed as far away as he could from the weird thing, saying shit about survival of the fittest, that if the bird was left behind it was meant to die. Izzie had ignored him, and bustled around the house looking for a box and stole his t-shirt and filled a hot water bottle to create a “surrogate nest” (“Read step two, Alex, no, step  _ two _ , I already secured it!”). 

She put it in their closet, the squirming little thing. He’d stared down at its fake nest, nestled next to his sneakers and her underwear drawer, as Izzie crouched down, cooing at it like it’s real mother. He’d warned her that he was liable to step on it, but she’d only rolled her eyes and thrust the hot water bottle in his hands, with strict instructions to “keep an eye on Marcie.” He’d complained, definitely. Whined that his name suggestions - Ugly, Bird, or, creatively, Ugly Bird - had been dismissed. But he’d sat there in the dark anyway, hadn’t he? Tucked the stupid hot water bottle in the stupid fake nest, and brushed a careful finger over the soft tufts of newly-grown feathers on its head. Fell asleep in there. He was woken up by tiny chirping, and Izzie’s quiet kiss on his forehead. 

“Do you remember Marcie?” he mumbles to George, pressing his face deeper into his hands. He doesn’t know how long it has been since George found him, how long he’s sat here waiting for his head to calm its spinning. He doesn’t understand time anymore, not after those endless days of syrupy nothingness, with only the steady cycle of people filtering in and out to talk nothing at him, and boxes of juice forced into him, and the smell of tomato soup sending him over the toilet bowl, to mark the minutes passed. 

“Marcie? Was that a patient?” 

“She was a bird.” 

Alex feels him still. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. Izzie’s baby bird.” George laughs, but maybe it’s more of a sob. “She loved that thing.” 

“Fuck,” George says. Alex remembers suddenly that George loved her, too. “I miss her.” 

And Alex -- Alex doesn’t miss her. He aches for her, like she was a limb torn viciously from his body. He’s nothing without her. He’s left here, a gaping hole where flesh and blood and bone used to be. An open wound, prepped and ready for sepsis to set in.

There’s a space in him that was beaten into nothing. Or maybe he was just born with some integral part of him missing, leaving him just slightly off; too abrasive, blind to everything that mattered, a constant, relentless fuck-up. It was a space she fought and fought to fill, and he’d tried his damndest to keep it empty, fought her off with fighting words and careless fucking. Maybe even then a part of him knew that she wasn’t forever, that something as good as her would never survive in the toxic waste he was born in, the darkness and anger that he called home. But over the years he’s gotten older, gotten weaker, and one day he opened his eyes and saw her curled up next to him in bed and felt himself wake up, for the first time in his life. Years before she became his wife, she became a part of him. Like a tumor, she grew and grew until the parts that Izzie planted in him were inseparable from who he was. Like she was his heart, the one thing keeping it beating, the one thing keeping him upright. 

So how can he go on, without his heart, and no one to cut an LVAD wire for him, to get him a new one? 

  
  
  


He tells Meredith the bird story that night, tucked in like a child in a mother’s bed. It’s Meredith’s bed but he’s not her child, and what does he know about mothers, anyway? The bed is warm. Alex is unsure of what has happened in the long stretch of afternoon between peeling himself off of the bathroom floor and now, eyes drooping, telling an impossible story about his wife, who he will never see again. 

“We called the bird rehabilitation center,” he’s saying. Meredith is nodding along, her eyebrows doing a lot of things that he could usually decipher in an instant. Right now, he can’t quite feel his own body, nevermind read facial expressions. “Well, you know the story, right...”

Her hand pauses from where it is rubbing up and down his calf, like she’s trying to start a fire or remind him he is still here. Oh, so she’d been doing that. “I do know the story, Alex. But you can keep telling it.” 

He doesn’t want to anymore. He kind of thinks he’s about to cry. 

“Oh, Alex.” 

Meredith is so gentle with him. In the morning, when his body belongs to him again and he remembers who he’s supposed to be to everyone but Izzie, he’ll erect every wall that the bathroom floor eroded. But in this moment, all he can do is lie there and be petted, and try not to cry even as the tears slip effortlessly off of his face, pooling in his ears, wetting the pillow, making it hard to breathe. 

“Mere,” he says, barely audible, the name sitting like heavy, wet cement in his mouth. He’s fading. “She was so sad when they took the bird away, even though she knew it was the right thing, she was… she was still so sad...” 

Meredith hugs him, then. He vaguely recalls being touched a lot today. George’s firm grip around his arm, leading Alex like a newly-blinded man to the couch. Cristina’s hands pushing nameless food into his lax grip, threatening to feed him if he doesn’t attempt to eat himself. His head, pushed onto Meredith’s lap, and the feeling of the vibrations running through her body as she said things to him he could hear only in warbling, underwater tones. 

She is saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re okay, Alex. It’s okay...” 

He realizes that he is talking, too: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry... fuck, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” 

He gets no answer from the one person that matters. He doesn’t deserve her forgiveness, anyway. 

  
  
  


Once, over a quiet lunch in the company of Really Old Guy, Izzie had described the way Denny’s death had washed everything else in her life with darker, blander colors. “Even muffins tasted different, you know? And, like, fall. And reruns of Housewives. It’s like everything that used to be beautiful to me just… stopped being beautiful.” She’d looked down, tucked a strand of yellow behind her ear. “It’s the contrast that gets me these days. When something feels good, or makes me laugh, it feels so impossible, you know? Because I remember how overwhelmingly terrible and empty it was for the longest time, and how much it felt like it would never end, and then suddenly, I’m here laughing. It doesn’t make sense, but here I am...” 

He hadn’t really understood then. He hadn’t dealt with death before. He’d seen the death of patients, called the time in a monotone voice through that heady, monotonous disappointment that a flatline made him feel, dreading that terrible moment when the patient’s wife’s face would crumble and she’d just fall to the ground. Caused the death of a patient, once, twice, because of some careless mistake and lived with the guilty aftermath. But he witnessed these things from the outside. Saw that woman’s grief as a reminder to go home and hold Izzie as tight as he could. His childhood was marked with absence and punishment, screaming and insanity, and loneliness created by choice rather than the tight, inescapable grip of death. 

He spent a lot of time thinking about it. A few times wishing for it, especially in those blank and empty years of college, when he spent a lot of time getting drunk and getting high and fucking around and really feeling not much at all beyond a dull buzz like his mind was a fly trapped under a bell jar. There was an invisible edge he teetered on, then. Blades he held a little too close. 

He’d always been prone to copying what he sees. How much of his childhood was spent watching his mother dance in concentric circles around death? How many times did he call 9-1-1 in a steady voice, as she sobbed and screamed and held a kitchen knife in a vertical threat against the delicate white skin of her wrist? 

But grief was not an emotion he knew, not like Izzie, who carried it as intimately as a lover or the memory of a childhood friend. Yes, she started smiling, after those delicate few weeks of frantic, mindless baking. She started laughing, too, sometimes hysterically, sometimes with the very real threat of peeing her pants. But even after those muffins started tasting good to her again, there was a part of her that held the memory of those hours spent on the bathroom floor, and that would never be forgotten. 

He thinks he understands now. 

  
  
  


The morning after he wakes up in Meredith’s bed to her snoring next to him, he can’t quite get up out of bed. So he stays there. And he doesn’t move for days, alternating between restless sleep and a blurred state of crushing, full-bodied weight that comes from somewhere in his chest and anchors him resolutely to the mattress. 

He sleeps a lot. Dreams of strange and violent things. Flashes of a man with his face smashed in, blurred out and unrecognizable; poor bastard, a victim of a bus-on-pedestrian crash, and the bus really one. Alex somehow knows, in a sinking, innate part of himself, that it is George, and that he is a hero. He dreams of his mother, whose name he has not uttered in an uncountable amount of years, holding a squaling newborn baby covered in blood, laughing through her sobs as the doctor calls out, “It’s a boy!” Once, he dreams of his sister getting her throat cut open, and he wakes up frozen and swimming in sweat. 

And, over and over, he dreams of Izzie. Izzie in a hospital gown, dying alone from a heart transplant not meant to be. Izzie, remembering nothing except what she shouldn’t. Izzie painted in gold, white light hitting the swell of her pregnant belly, and he knows he is the father, and he is so, so happy for it. Izzie with her cheek pressed against the bathroom floor. Izzie with her hair grown out long enough to tie up, she gets in the car and he watches her leave and he knows she won’t be coming back. 

He doesn’t put much conviction into his dreams. It doesn’t shock him that his psyche is a fucked-up, damaged place full of unconscious horrors and alternate realities he longs to be a part of. 

They wake up the house sometimes. Apparently, he screams. On those nights Meredith will shake him awake, say “It’s just a dream, you’re okay, you’re okay,” and, when it’s especially bad, hold him as he falls apart from nothing at all. 

He thinks, endlessly, of Izzie in those weeks after Denny. He doesn’t know how she managed to get out of bed. How she was standing upright, how she could say, “I’m fine,” even when it was a lie. But she was always stronger than him, and he was born weak. 

Else, there’s not much that he does except stare listlessly at the people that knock on the door or stand at a safe distance from the bed to talk at him or leave bowls of dry cereal and sandwiches on the bedside table. There’re a lot of people. If he had the time to think of anything beyond the unspeakable sadness that he wears like the sweatpants he’s had on for days, he’d wonder at the novelty of the fact that he has so many people that have it in them to care about him. He didn’t really have friends, growing up; he didn’t have much of anything. There were the guys on the wrestling team, but they did little more than drink and smoke together, and now he barely remembers any of their faces, as if the years in between a few vividly painful childhood moments and Seattle Grace happened to a person that wasn’t him. He’s always tended to lose time in that way; he thinks it should scare him, how little he knows about who he is and who he used to be, but he can’t quite feel enough to muster up the emotion. 

Somehow, now, he has people like Meredith, who holds him at night instead of the man she loves. And Derek, even, who gave him and Izzie their wedding. He thinks, distantly, that he should thank them, for letting Izzie die his wife.

  
  
  


One day, there is a funeral. 

Izzie planned it herself, after the wedding. She’d said, “I need  _ something  _ to do. And I don’t want… after it happens, I don’t want you to have to do it. Or my mom, especially not my mom, she’d probably hire a band or get up there to sing “Amazing Grace” herself, can you imagine?” Then, seeing him looking at her, seeing the way that her words had destroyed him, just a little, seeing the way everything was destroying him: “Alex, it’s okay. Alex, don’t look at me like that. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. Just let me do this, okay? For me. For you.” 

People keep saying that to him. “You’re going to be okay.” 

Izzie said it a lot, in those last days. Said it in those words, said it in descriptions of the nice girl he’d end up dating after she died, the kids he’d have, how good of a father he would be, the children whose lives he would save with a scalpel. Said it as she asked him to “keep an eye on Meredith, Alex, I know she has Cristina but sometimes they just enable each other. Make sure she’s okay. And George. You’ve… you’ve gotta be there for George.” 

Said it into his hair, that one, terrible night, when she was comforting him instead of the other way around, but maybe it had always been that way: “You have to promise me. That you’ll be okay, after. It’s the only thing I want. Otherwise I’ll have to come back and haunt you, and trust me, you don’t want that. I’d really fuck up your day, mess up your charts. I know how much ghosts spook the shit out of you, and believe me, I’d try to possess someone. If you test me, it could be you.” 

That made him laugh, through the lump in his throat. She was always doing that. Making him laugh. Making him whole. Making him promise something, something that she knew he wouldn’t be able to keep. Knowing that he would have to anyway, because she was Izzie and he was Alex and even through all of the messiness, that’s just who she was to him.

His wife. His friend. His heart, his everything. 

He ignores the fact that she’s not his wife anymore, that she’s nothing. And the vows were until death do us part. 

But he’s sitting up, anyway, the morning of. Surviving, and the numbers don’t look good, but he’s doing it anyway. It helps that he feels nothing at all, sees everything as an outside observer, looking on through fogged-up glasses, looking into this terrible dream that he wants out of. Another dream that he wants in on, but he can’t say these things out loud, she could be listening. 

He takes a shower, his first one in days, and somehow he doesn’t drown. Meredith waits outside the door, chattering loudly over the rushing water about her incompetent interns, making sure he doesn’t pass out or slit his wrists. 

“I’m not gonna kill myself,” he yells through the door.

She doesn’t respond. Meredith knows things about killing yourself, and Meredith knows Alex. She goes back to talking about the weird intern threesome that neither of them give a shit about. 

He gets dressed in a black suit that doesn’t belong to him. 

Meredith asks him, quietly, if he wants a shave. He sees himself in the mirror, knows it doesn’t look good. Knows he should say yes, so he says, “Yes.” 

George does it; they don’t trust him with sharp objects. He should protest, should raise his hackles indignantly at the idea of O’Malley doing anything for him, nevermind an act reserved only for himself and versions of fathers that he never had. Nevermind touching his face like this, all gentle like Alex is anything but a knife’s serrated edge. 

But all he does is sit at the edge of the bathtub and watch through blurry vision as George drops the razor into the soapy water. 

Alex blinks, his eyelids feeling slow and heady. The world is nothing, now. 

And then George is in front of him, suddenly, saying things that sound like they’re coming to him from behind the veil, and he doesn’t catch a single word. He has to remind himself that he isn’t dead, and each time he remembers is a terrible thing. 

George is gentle with him, painfully so. His fingers rest carefully, casually, just below his jaw. He knows they’re all waiting with bated breath for the final, explosive breakdown. He’d give it to them, but he’s been crying all the time, anyway, it would just be anti-climactic. 

Words come to mind, and he waits as they travel slow, slowly, from the back of his brain to his tongue. “She wanted you to speak,” he says. His voice is hoarse, and the words come out like clotted blood pooling in his mouth from something torn, deep in his stomach. 

He thinks he sees him nod. The razor makes a scraping sound, and it’s all he can hear, even as George says, “I have something prepared.”

“Do you think it’s - it’s okay, that I… She wanted me to speak but I…” I can’t. 

He can’t. He’s nothing, now. Reduced to stumbling words, unfinished sentences and crumbling into small, microcosmic pieces under O’Malley’s offensively careful touch. He can’t, he never can, and he never could. 

George says, “It’s okay.” Dabs the wet cloth against his face, wipes away the bubbles and the beard. “You just have to get through it, moment and minute. Today, tomorrow. Whatever you have to do. That’s… that’s all she wanted.”

Alex wonders, how could you know? 

Izzie said to him, once, tequila on her tongue. Before Denny became a symptom of her tumor, the writing on the wall he could not see and laughed off when she brought him the message, a canary dying and dying again but not soon enough. Never enough. “Sometimes I feel him with me. I don’t know about god, ghosts. Energy, my mom would say,” and she chuckled, raised her eyebrows, like  _ what? _ , “I don’t know what comes after, whatever. But I know him, and I know…” Her hand went over chest. Where her heart was, once. 

Beating. Once. 

“I know he’s here with me.” 

Alex knows nothing. Alex feels, with his hand pressed against his chest, alone. Izzie’s gone, dead. If she’s here he doesn’t fucking know where.

  
  
  


Izzie’s face is calm and still. She’s wearing the wig she wore to their wedding, and light pink lipstick. If he were crazy enough, like his mother, or Rebecca, who he thinks he really did love, he’d pull her out of the mahogany wood and run away, far away. Convince himself she’s only suffered a slight brush with death, and is really alive in between all of the cancer and the still heart, and live out the rest of his days with his wife’s rotting corpse. He’d be happy, maybe, crazy and happy and it’s already happening away, he may as well lean into it. 

The rot. It’s already happening. Underneath her caked-on foundation and glued-shut eyelids. Inside his own head, inescapable as genetics and here, right now, making the trees sway when the air is still and making the people he thinks he must know look like strangers. He is not too different from the women in his life, from the woman who gave him life. His hand reaches out to touch her fingers, and he is met with cold. 

Later, he watches as Izzie’s mother walks up to the body of her daughter. She crumples at the casket, and her hands hover uselessly around in the air, her mouth opening and closing in silent, empty grief. Then, she turns her face upwards, and wails her unimaginable loss into the blue sky and the shining, shining sun. 

George cries in the middle of his eulogy. Alex sits there, his hand limp in Meredith’s tight grip, and imagines hellfire and busses, a bullet torn through his chest, a bullet in everyone’s chest. 

The priest walks forward. He’s in the full, ridiculous get-up, white robe and somber look and everything. 

“Do you really need a priest?” Alex had asked in between bites of Chinese take-out fried rice, during one of those times that the morphine in her veins was potent enough to prop her up and give her a smile, during one of those times that Alex could talk about something like her funeral without struggling to breathe and imagining the many ways he would join her. On those days they talked about it, even joked about it, in terms of some hypothetical alternate reality that they would never really reach. Just something to pass the time with, play pretend with, even as reality started knocking on their door. 

On other days, on bad days, which were most days, they talked about it like it had already happened, and they were both standing in the catastrophic aftermath. 

Izzie looked up from the papers that were scattered around her. There were many things to consider, when planning your own funeral. The flowers, the location, the day. Whether you wanted your body to be on display. The speakers and the hymns, and the verses, and whether you wanted a priest or just Meredith with a piece of paper. He wanted Meredith, figured she was pretty good at delivering bad news, she had all the practice, after all. “Alex,” Izzie said, eyes rolling, “For my poor mother. I need a priest.  _ She  _ needs a priest, or she’ll convince herself that I’m burning in hell for eternity, and spend the rest of her life paying for indulgences, for fuck’s sake.”

“Who cares? It’s your funeral. And you’ll be in hell anyway. For the adultery and all. And for all of the sex out of wedlock.”

She laughed, hard. He was good at that, too, sometimes. “I’m only going to hell so we can spend the rest of hell eternity together. It’s a selfless, romantic gesture.”

He’d winked, and said he was looking forward to it. 

The priest, in question, is awkward. He clears his throat too much, stutters a little. He’s young and wide-eyed, and Alex thinks this must be his first funeral but when he speaks he seems to say all the right stuff. He isn’t that sure, anyway, because all he’s hearing is Izzie’s laugh and he’s never been very good at listening to what is really there.

“Finally, to, uh, conclude today’s service, we will hear a reading from the Book of Lamentations, which has been chosen by Isobel, herself. She asked for Dr. Miranda Bailey to do the reading.” 

“Before I speak,” says Bailey, and her voice is wrecked. Loud, as always, but sad, in a way he remembers only from when she thought her son might die. “I want to say that Izzie Stevens was a good student. She was a good doctor. And she was good at medicine because she was, through and through, a beautifully good person. Even when it was hard to be, and even when the world was doing its best to break her to its awful will, she was good, regardless, in spite of it all. She was good, she was kind, she was smart. I am lucky to have known her, to have taught her, and to have experienced some of the goodness that she gave to this world.”

Alex realizes he is crying again.

_ My soul is deprived of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is; I tell myself my future is lost, all that I hoped for from the Lord. _

Will he ever stop? 

_ The thought of my homeless poverty is wormwood and gall; Remembering it over and over leaves my soul downcast within me. But I will call this to mind, as my reason to have hope: The favors of the Lord are not exhausted, his mercies are not spent; They are renewed each morning, so great is his faithfulness. _

What Izzie wanted for him was for him to be alive after she was dead. Be alive and stay alive, she’d said, once, two weeks ago, two lifetimes ago. 

_ My portion is the Lord, says my soul; therefore will I hope in him. Good is the Lord to one who waits for him, to the soul that seeks him; It is good to hope in silence for the saving help of the Lord. The Word of the Lord. _

This promise - he doesn’t know if it is one that he can keep.

  
  


He stays alive. He doesn’t count it as a miracle. He doesn’t promise forever. 


End file.
